US regulators team up to fine and halt a crypto portfolio app offering synthetic exposure to traditional assets, which was not offered to US investors.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued a joint fine to Abra, a crypto portfolio app that let users get synthetic exposure to traditional markets.
According to the SEC’s release, Abra effectively offered “security-based swaps” to retail investors without the proper registration, in addition to “failing to transact those swaps on a registered national exchange.”
Abra offered a type of “centralized” synthetic asset, where users were able to get exposure to traditional securities like stocks by putting up Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) as collateral.